Editorial. Weasel words

Citation

Coleman, J. (1998), "Editorial. Weasel words", European Business Review, Vol. 98 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.1998.05498fab.006

Editorial. Weasel words

Edited byJohn Coleman

Editorial

Weasel words

The public are fed up with the weasel words of modern politicians and this applies not only in the domestic sphere but even more in the politics of the European Union. The story is that Ronald Reagan as President of the USA used to get exasperated by having to follow the statistical paths mapped out by his advisors and used to throw up his hand and say "Hell! can't we do something honest just for once even if they chuck us out?" This is surely the kind of response ordinary people are looking for from their political leaders. Maybe honesty is an idea whose time is arriving.

Robin Cook is clearly couching his proposals for the future of the European Union in so-called Euro-sceptic language [1] but this may be no more than a sop to the Euro-sceptic sentiments of the British public and probably to the Continental public as well. The response of Kohl and Chirac to which he refers is to recognise that they are not really carrying their electorates with them and therefore they must improve their PR work rather than making any fundamental change in the direction in which they are driving Europe.

A few real steps towards decentralisation would make all the difference in the world to the public's perception of the European Union; for example, looking seriously at James Robertson's proposal about currency in issue five of this journal. No country ­ certainly not Germany ­ is happy about the Euro and a major step would be to let the national currencies exist side by side with it for an indefinite period. Britain, Denmark and Sweden are doing this. Why not Germany and France? Why should the control of money go completely into the hands of bankers whom people do not entirely trust.

Another step forward to make the Foreign Secretary's words convincing would be to look closely at the proposals in Sir Richard Body's book, The Breakdown of Europe. It is not quite so pessimistic as Peter Unwin suggests in his review of this book. On page 76 Body writes:

if the European Union could be transformed into a scaled-up version of Switzerland it would give real hope ­ perhaps the only hope ­ of surviving more than a decade or two.

Surely this is no more than making a reality of subsidiarity? That should not be too difficult for the present British Government which has taken steps that may well lead to parts of the British Isles getting the powers of independent peoples. Vastly increased decentralisation looks like being the fashion for vastly better educated electorates in the twenty-first century. Serbia is not pointing in that direction (Unwin's alternative to Switzerland); it wants to behave like, and ultimately be, a big country.

The article by David Miller, Britain's first Ambassador to Armenia, will be of particular importance to those looking at problems beyond Europe's immediate boundaries. The problems of Nagorno Karbakh are those of a small coherent people wanting self-determination and are more or less universal and indeed have much in common with the Welsh, the Scottish and the Irish within the UK as well as many other regions within the European Union. Armenia itself, it should be remembered, has played an important part in recent European history. The failure to respond to the massacre of Armenians after the First World War no doubt gave Hitler the confidence that he could safely go ahead with his policies of mass extermination. The Armenians are a highly intelligent people and perhaps the fact that their country was the first country in the world to become Christian and is situated next to Iran puts them in a unique position to create international understanding between the Christian and Muslim worlds.

In contrast Arnold Kransdorff points to a problem right at the heart of western industrial culture. Corporate memory and the wisdom that organisations, not just businesses, gathered used to be considered a vital part of our social structure. There is now a slow realisation that we may have sacrificed too much in the name of flexibility. It is interesting to note that the book was turned down five years before its present publication date by the same commissioning editor that accepted it later ­ yet another example of an idea whose time is arriving.

The last article by Thomas Orzág-Land reflects the kind of co-operation that Europe must build up on a much wider basis than just the present European Union. Sir John Birch's review of Peter Unwin's book, Hearts, Minds and Interests, also points towards some of the lost values which need to be rediscovered if Britain is once again to make its creative contribution to the world, though perhaps just by discovering what Edmund Burke called "This little platoons" we will slowly and painfully be able to create a world in which the health and welfare of individuals and small groups will be the route to achieving the health of the whole, which is after all the heart of the message of Leopold Kohr's great book The Breakdown of Nations.

Reference

1 New Statesman, 14 August 1998.